All The President's Wise Men

This article is the fifth installment of an HPR series exploring President Kennedy’s legacy as we reflect on the 50th anniversary of his assassination.
David Halberstam opened his seminal work on the policy debate of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, with a description of a small meeting held by President-Elect Kennedy with Republican business executive Robert Lovett. Lovett, who had served as Secretary of Defense to President Truman, recommended the names of several people to Kennedy. This group included Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy, the men who would become the chief foreign policy advisers to the new President.
This meeting was the first overture by Kennedy to the nebulous group of mainly East Coast financiers, lawyers, and diplomats who had dominated American Cold War foreign policy. The group, which has been famously called “The Establishment,” included some of the foremost Cold Warriors, such as President Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and Ambassadors Averell Harriman, Charles Bohlen, and George Kennan. In The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas describe them as diverse of opinion, but sharing a broad commitment to internationalism, American leadership, and containment of communism. It was a bipartisan group, comprising Republicans such as Lovett and Democrats such as Harriman.
Both the elder statesmen and younger advisers under President Kennedy saw the appeasement policy before the Second World War as the fatal mistake of the Allies, and vowed to never surrender to aggression in the same way. Almost all had either served in the conflict or had been making national policy at the time. Most had attended Harvard or Yale and knew each other from college and social settings. Harriman and Acheson had, for instance, rowed on the same crew team. Most shared a moneyed background, if not in their youth, then in their professions. In the words of Evan and Isaacson, they believed in “a link between free markets, free trade, and free men.”
President Kennedy had tremendous respect for this group, and it composed the core of his foreign policy advisers. Kennedy’s tenure, with Harvard- and Yale-educated advisers working both in and out of government, marked a high point for “The Establishment.” However, it set the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that ultimately split “The Establishment” and caused the decline of its power.
Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, respectively, had the strongest ties to the Eastern Establishment. Rusk had served under Acheson at the State Department, before becoming President of the Rockefeller Foundation. Bundy had even more sterling credentials. The nephew by marriage of Acheson, he had served as Dean of Harvard College and had designed policy positions for Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey of New York. Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, was not originally a member of the Eastern elite. However, he had worked in the Defense Department and as a Professor at Harvard Business School, and was recommended by Lovett as well. Along with his official advisers, Kennedy continued to consult with individuals such as Lovett and Acheson. Another influential outside adviser was John McCloy, a Wall Street lawyer who had worked in the Defense Department during the war, then served as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany after the war.
Isaacson and Thomas write that in early crises faced by the Kennedy Administration, “the dominating players were not the best and the brightest of Kennedy’s ‘new generation,’ but the aging war-horses of Harry Truman’s old one.” Acheson and Harriman especially were crucial in deliberations about the Laos and Berlin Crises in 1961. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Acheson, McCloy, and Lovett were all consulted, along with official members of the Executive Committee.
Unfortunately, the near absolute control that this group exerted over foreign policy allowed few dissenting opinions. Despite tactical disagreements, they were all strongly in favor of American strength and intervention to contain perceived communist aggression. This consensus proved disastrous in the deliberations regarding Vietnam. By 1963, the situation in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was deteriorating rapidly, with massive demonstrations against President Diem’s government. In this atmosphere, only one member of the Administration, Undersecretary of State George Ball, opposed increased American involvement. Ball famously warned President Kennedy that “we will have 300,000 troops on the ground and we won’t be able to find them.” Kennedy dismissed the warning, responding: “George, you’re mad as hell. That will never happen.”
While there were debates about the proper course of policy in Vietnam, there was never a question among the principals about the role of the United States: it must remain engaged and commit additional troops to support the RVN if that became necessary. Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, as well as Adviser Bundy and other establishment hawks, supported maintaining the American presence, at the cost of being drawn further and further into a Far-Eastern quagmire.
The Kennedy policy, so strongly shaped by scions of “the Establishment,” committed the United States to war in Southeast Asia. This war would create a split not only in the nation, but also within the cabinet and establishment leaders. Individuals were forced to choose sides between continued escalation and gradual withdrawal. While “the Establishment” remained in existence after the war, the bipartisan cooperation on foreign policy that had existed at the high executive level was shattered, as party affiliation became just as important as pragmatic ideas. Broken as well was the trust of ordinary Americans in the elite to make good decisions without oversight on foreign policy. Split into disparate factions, new groups coalesced around certain ideas or politicians, leading each back into the sun during various Presidential Administrations. However, Vietnam, the crisis for which Kennedy and his “best and brightest” set the stage, was in some sense the sunset for “The Establishment”—ending forever the complete and total dominance of the wealthy elite over American foreign policy.
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